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Authors: Daniel Fox

Tags: #Magic, #Fantasy fiction, #Dragons, #Fiction, #Fantasy, #General, #Epic

Hidden Cities (4 page)

BOOK: Hidden Cities
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When he was young and hungry—
young and pretty
, he liked to say, without worrying whether it had ever been true—he sold his body, often and often. More than once he sold himself more literally, into formal bondage; and stole himself back again each time, running in the dark with the bond-fee tucked safe into his cheek.

For a while he had been an itinerant magician, until the people he impressed grew too urgent and too demanding, wanting proper magic, curses that worked and fortunes that might actually come true. That time he walked away in daylight, more dignified but no more honest, leaving promises that held as much value as his horoscopes.

That time the fees they paid swung in a purse inside his robes, from where his own nimble fingers could not have stolen it. He felt like a stallion with his worth hung between his legs, ponderous and heavy.

He became a doctor by happenstance and crime, the way he had lived all his life. He might have used the money in his purse to buy himself the knowledge that he needed; indeed, he swore that he would. He found a mentor and paid upfront, half of what the old man asked. Traveled with him for a season, learned what he would need—the tricks and patterns of a doctor’s speech, the names of herbs and cures, the proper size of fees—and then denounced the old man to a magistrate as a fraud and felon.

Provided evidence enough to see his mentor’s head struck off.

Paid the magistrate his due share of the old man’s goods and moneys, kept the rest and called himself a doctor in the next town that he came to, and the next.

He hadn’t meant to stay long with the army—he never meant to stay long anywhere, never long enough to see his patients die—but soldiers can prove reluctant to see a doctor go. Sometimes he was lucky, some men recovered. Some men always will, despite their doctors.

That kind of luck wouldn’t last, he knew. Luck has a way of turning sour, like soup let sit too long. The wrong man would die, or too many men too close together.

Santung was a mistake he should have walked away from. But the real doctor’s empty tent had been too tempting and the road too long, too hard. He was suddenly tired of always moving on. He could discover a taste for staying still, the same roof every morning, the same path outside the door, not walking it.

This was not the place, the tent no enduring roof. It was a mistake. He knew it. And yet, and yet: he stayed. Some wiser part of him was only waiting to find catastrophe, but he was a fat man and that worried whisper was small and buried deep.

When Tien came, he thought at first that she was the catastrophe.

Then he thought she was a blessing. She had the knowledge that could destroy him, and decided not to use it. She could doctor, but she was too young and the wrong sex; he had authority to match his ignorance. Together they were stronger than either one apart. His luck had brought her to him, good sense should make her stay, and she was sensible. She must see that. And yet, he did not trust her. She had a secret purpose, something more than putting rice in the bowl each day and accumulating comforts in the tent.

Also there was her woman, the silent servant that she called Mu Gao. Biao disliked her entirely. How could he beguile someone
who would not speak to him? She washed the clothes and cooked the meals, did all the work of the tent and he detested her.

Every night in the darkness, Biao’s private self told him to go. His days were easy, though, and hard to walk away from. He was cozened by comforts, a full belly and a dry bed. Tomorrow, perhaps, he would just pack and leave …

A
LWAYS TOMORROW;
and now perhaps tomorrow was too late. Today the emperor had come back to Santung, war had come and the dragon with it.

Or the dragon had come, and war with her.

Biao had seen the dragon flying, with some poor captive thing in her claw.

He knew all the inner shades of fear from intimate experience, but he had never been more terrified. When the clouds broke because she broke them, when she hung like a line of wet brushwork against the paper sky.

Biao could not read, but he knew the character for death, and she was it.

He would have run then—why not, when everyone was running?—but that it all seemed suddenly too late. He was fat and tired, and could not outrun a dragon.

Neither could he outstubborn Tien. She said she was going down into the city, to treat the wounded of whichever side. And taking Mu Gao to help her; and him too, taking him.

Her scorn was a whip that his fear hardly needed. In the end, indeed, he came down ahead of her, while she dallied over some stray unexpected boy. He and Mu Gao, doing whatever they could between them. War was simple butchery, by and large, and called for simple medicine. Complications saved themselves for later days, for putrefying wounds and sweating fevers. He would happily leave now, and leave those to Tien.

Tien came to find them, sooner than he might have wished.
And then the storm came, the dragon’s typhoon; and then the emperor’s guard, desperate for a doctor, him.

Her.

Him.

A
ND SO
this, a warehouse of stone, a shelter for the wounded and the half-drowned. And the emperor too, half naked and extraordinary, fussing over his pet girl. His
pregnant
pet.

That was an opportunity, but Tien would waste it. She would let the emperor take the girl back to Taishu, to his own imperial doctors, when she might instead attach herself with just a few worried words, a gesture of kindness, a hint of hidden knowledge.

Biao could not read but he could see this written, a secure horoscope, a new life under the emperor’s broad roof. He could see Tien spurn it or simply not understand it, let the opportunity go by. He wouldn’t care, but he could go with her, where he could not go alone. Master Biao was nothing here, but the mentor of Mei Feng’s private midwife, oh yes …

Tien apparently preferred to doctor the common soldiery, going from one bleeding groaning nobody to the next. Biao really had no choice but to go with her, carrying the bag of herbs and staying close, where he could at least seem to be an equal voice. From a distance, to anyone who couldn’t overhear.

Here again, blade-wounds and broken bones were the most of what they saw. At least he could treat cuts himself, and set a bone as well as anyone. He could let Tien get a bed ahead of him, even. He could have this man’s friends hold him still, jerk the leg clean and sharp into its proper alignment, tie off a splint and dispense a simple mixture of herbs to ease pain, reduce swelling, help the bone to knit.

He could turn to catch up with Tien and find her oddly still, oddly quiet, far from her usual brisk competence. Kneeling above a half-naked figure with a man who sat beside, both just as silent and unmoving.

And the man was barely more than a boy, and something about him reminded Biao very much of the emperor; and the one he crouched over was a girl, and hideously burned. Hideous in her burning, Biao thought, and she would heal worse, her flesh twisting and contracting as it scarred.

If she healed at all. He thought it would have been kinder to slit her throat and leave her in the street. She might die yet, but it would be a slow death now and cruel of the boy to drag her through it.

From her silence, he thought that Tien was thinking much the same.

And couldn’t say it, of course, not possibly. When at last she stirred, when she did speak, she said, “I can make you up a brew to bathe her skin. I will give you a tea in the meantime, to ease the pain and help her sleep. No dressings, it will be best to let her wounds dry in the air, when they are done with seeping.”

The boy said, “She cannot bear to have them touched, that’s why I …”

Why he had left her lying naked, uncovered, his gesture said. Among all these men, one perfect breast exposed, one ruined.

“Yes,” Tien said. “We will find her a room, where the two of you can be private.”

But the boy was shaking his head, saying, “I am taking her home. To Taishu, as soon as the first boat sails.”

“Impossible,” Tien said sharply. “She is too hurt to move, she could not bear it.”

“I carried her here, and she bore that. We belong in the mountains, she and I. I have the emperor’s promise, I can take her home.”

Tien shook her head again and almost seemed to look around for the emperor, to have that promise withdrawn. Biao took advantage of the moment to ask a simple question.

“What does she have in her mouth?” A leather thong hung from her lips, and looped around the back of her neck: something she wore as a pendant, that she was sucking now.

“Jade,” the boy said, impossibly. And reached a hand to his own throat and touched the stone that hung there, glimmering green; and no, it couldn’t possibly be jade, and yet …

That was what this boy had in common with the emperor, Biao realized: a faint green cast to his skin, as though it were dusted with jade. He said
the mountains
, he said
Taishu
, they must come from one of the mining clans; and it still made no sense, it was utterly unlawful for mere mortals to be wearing jade, but Biao was beginning to believe it.

He said, “How can she …?”

“The emperor allows us. His private guard and me,” without quite saying who or what he was himself. “It helps her now, I think, it keeps her strong. Strong enough to make the journey,” defiantly, almost flung across the silent bitter body at Tien.

Who shook her head, defiant too; said, “She will need treatment daily, if she is to heal well.”

“There are other doctors. Imperial doctors, on Taishu already …”

“… Who do not know my remedies, don’t have access to my books. And will not be willing to travel up into the mountains, live there months among your people. It will take months, to bring her back to health.”

“Teach me,” the boy said. “Give me the herbs and show me how to use them.”

Again, Tien shook her head. “It needs a doctor. These drugs are dangerous; I would not trust them to anyone not used to giving doses and observing the results.”

“You come, then.”

“No. My work is here,” with a gesture around at so many others hurt.

“Some of these too will be coming to Taishu.”

“And some will not. And I don’t belong to, to the army,”
to the emperor
Biao thought she had nearly said, nearly, “the city needs me here; and the books are here too, that I need,” and she had her
secret too, something to do with the dragon and a boy, and no, she would not leave.

“The emperor will make it an order, if I ask him to.”

“And still I will not go; and what then?”

Then, inevitably, they would come down to threat and counter-threat,
the emperor will have you carried away in bonds
and
I will not treat your friend then, not treat anyone, not be a doctor if I am a prisoner
—and Biao forestalled them both.

“I will go,” he said.

They stared at him.

“I am a doctor,” he said, with at least some evidence about him. “I will … confer with Tien, what remedies she thinks best, what treatments,” when they could be alone, when she could show him exactly, “and I will come with you.”

A roof, safe shores, the end of the weary road. A reputation he could bring with him, a task within his powers if the girl should live, and small blame on his shoulders if not.

And jade: a fortune that could be worn on a boy’s neck, sucked in a girl’s mouth. Jade in the valleys, freshly mined, and himself right there, oh yes.

five
 

andan was surprising herself, surpassing herself.

She felt like a knife: chilled and forged and sharpened, lethal,
meant
.

It astonished her.

Till now, till this she had thought herself so placid, so content.

She had had a life and she liked it, in the jademaster’s palace. Then the emperor came and all his entourage, his eunuchs; and the jademaster made a gift of her along with all his things, his other things, to serve the emperor. Which meant, she thought, to serve his eunuchs; but they picked her out and paraded her before his mother the dowager empress.

Who picked her out and gave her to his girl, his favorite, Mei Feng. It was understood—at least by the empress—that Dandan was to be her spy. Along with all the other women that she picked, and the eunuchs too.

But Mei Feng picked out Dandan in her turn to be a confidante, and Dandan thought that perhaps the empress had spies enough, while perhaps Mei Feng was short of friends. When Mei Feng wanted to sneak over the water to Santung, of course Dandan went with her, though she had never left Taishu before and did not want to now.

And when they had crossed the strait in the dragon’s shadow and survived; when they had gone ashore to give thanks to the goddess and Mei Feng had nudged Dandan aside and stolen her away, even then Dandan had been willing. Someone had to stay
with the little fisher-girl, however wild she ran. She was the emperor’s favorite, his only love; and, what, should she go ramping off in wartime on her own? It was unthinkable. Unpardonable. There would be heads hewn from necks if it was discovered.

BOOK: Hidden Cities
13.38Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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